First and foremost, her pulchritude [from the Latin pulcher, meaning beautiful, fair], together with a remarkable ability to “play a role” for the still silent camera as complex as one in a motion picture.

How? Il linguaggio dei gesti [the language of gesture]. The Bay of Naples, where Loren grew up, was a place imbued with the history of Roman dramatic spectacles, from before the fifth century B.C.E., when Cicero wrote about elequentia corporis [eloquence of the body] in De Oratore, and long after the Commedia del Arte.

In the 1950s young Sophia Loren [then called Sofia Lazzaro] gestured & posed for fumetti [Italian, literally “little puffs of smoke,” in reference to the word balloons], the photo romances so popular in post-war Italy [a popularity that forms the basis for an early charming Fellini film called “The White Shiek”].

Her image was also printed on thousands of picture postcards still circulating throughout the world.

Instead of being rendered banal by this ubiquity, we recognize within it endless appealing variations of pulchritude and gesture, and appreciate what made her an iconic subject for photographers.